Only if I could bring back...

• Hot summer nights on my grandfather’s terrace, lying on our backs and looking up at the clear sparkling sky and racing each other to identify the constellations
• Watching ‘telesports’ with bhai on our black and white EC TV and laughing our guts out
• Tangy hot ‘phuchkas’ at gariahat with Diya and our first puffs in her amby with Appy wondering what these two girls-trying-to-be-women doing ducking at the back seat!
• Visits to Birla Museum with Sammy trying to look intelligent while she rattles away the details of the art on display
• Braving chilly winds and going for morning walks with the ‘polton’ (platoon) of cousins in kalyani during winter break
• Chotokaku’s monkey skull (and his narration of how he acquired it from a godman in the Himalayas on one of his anthropology tours) that fired our adolescent imagination
• Chotokaku’s planchette table - an inheritance that I had really hoped for.. (predictably Thamma got rid off it and the skull after he moved to Rhode Island)
• Sunday-post-lunch walks to khuni talao at the Ridge (D School campus) - the absolute quiet of the place, the eerie light and mostly shadows, the irritating stumbling bramble, the bristling frisson and goose bumps of knowing that none know of my whereabouts and of course the customary angry looks from IK when I would tell him with glee my exploits of the late afternoon.
• Bonfire at the Freedom party (for freshers) at D School and my verbal duel with IK
• Amazing ‘vada-sambar’ at Coffee House (D School) served on pristine white-but-chipped-here-and-there crockery
• Nimbo pani and dripping-oil bread roll at jai jawan tea stall (D School)
• New years eve at Fort William, Kolkata with San and bro and XXX rum for 2 bucks a peg
• Fried salami at Milli's place and San's expertise (the juvenile fear in his eyes when he gashed his little finger!)
• Long tirades from Ani when I moved to Delhi and she felt abandoned
• Last visit to Sparks with bro when they played Tequila Sunrise
• Watching Dominick and Eugene with bro and how he said ‘we are like that na…you and I?’
• Long late night drives on the Ring road..our conversations and more
• 30th December 2004 : Faith Hill never sounded like that night